The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

For me there isn’t. There never will be. In spite of the obstacles that chance placed in our path these many years, I’m convinced that we’re meant to be together. Who else knows you the way I do, Sudha? Who else knows how it felt to go through a decade of hopeless longing while you were married to someone else? Surely that means something to you, even in America?

  Write soon. Or better, come back soon, so you and I and your little girl can finally be a family.

  Love,

  Ashok

  Dayita is tired of sand. Her eyes fall on the slide, where the older children are playing. She crawls toward it, then tries to stand. She’s on her feet, swaying precariously on the uneven sand. She takes a step, then another. She’s walking—it’s her first time—her face alight with the adventure of moving beyond her babyhood. Then she loses her balance and sits down with a bump.

  Lost in Ashok’s words, Sudha sees none of this.

  Dayita will walk again soon—perhaps even this evening. They will see her then and make much of her. Still, this special moment in her life has come and gone, with no one to notice.

  Small tragedies, the hairline cracks in our relationships.

  She is up again already, trying to climb the iron rungs of the ladder that leads to the top of a slide that is surely far too high for her. She clings to the first rung, advances to the second. She’s on the third rung, pulling herself up by the sheer force of her stubbornness. Farther, farther, until she crawls onto the little ledge on top. Then she looks down the length of the slide and lets out a scream. She screams methodically and piercingly—she doesn’t waste energy in crying—until Sudha is startled out of her reverie.

  “Oh, my God! How did you get up there!” she cries, rushing to the slide. “Come down, baby. Come, Mummy will catch you.” But Dayita continues her clockwork screams. A little crowd has gathered around them by now—other children want to use the slide, and their parents give Sudha eloquently accusing glances—until finally she throws off her windbreaker, tucks up her sari, climbs the ladder, puts Dayita in her lap, and slides down with her.

  Let us remember her like this, no matter what happens later: a slim woman, radiant with laughter and speed, the knot of her hair loosened so that she appears younger than she is. This is the woman she would have been if the world had dealt with her more kindly. The wind sends the edge of her sari flying like a victory banner. The child in her lap claps in delight, and the woman presses her cheek to the child’s head. Her burnished curls are an innocent halo around her face. Untouched by worry or need, for a moment she belongs to the world of myth. She is the beautiful princess who lived in the palace of snakes.

  It is a tale from the time before birth and death, when Anju sat beneath the brittle, hopeful red of a maple tree, her hands clasped over the mound of her stomach.

  “Once there was a princess,” Anju said to Prem. “She lived in a beautiful palace beneath a lake—a palace made of snakes. Snake pillars, snake floors, a quilt of snakes who sang her to sleep every night. As long as she never left the palace, she was told, she would be happy.

  “So of course,” said Anju, “one day the princess left the palace and began to make her way upward. A stairway of pearl appeared, reaching all the way to the world of men, a world she thought beautiful. As you might expect, there was, on the shore, a young man. He held out his hand to pull her out of the water, and she took it. When he kissed her, she heard a sound like thunder, and turned to see that the stairway was gone.

  “The princess did not worry too much about this. She was in love. She followed the young man to his house, but his mother called her a witch and would not let her stay. The young man built the princess a cottage in the forest. They lived there happily enough, though the young man would go from time to time to visit his mother. The years passed. The princess gave birth to a baby girl. The man’s visits to his mother grew longer and longer, and one day he did not return at all. When the princess went to the village to search for him, she came upon a wedding: her lover was getting married to a rich girl his mother had picked out for him.

  “The princess did not confront her lover—what was the point? She took her daughter and started out for the serpent lake. She hoped the stairway would be there this time, in her need. But there was nothing. Or perhaps this was a different lake—she couldn’t quite tell. Thus began her journey from lake to lake, with her daughter. Everywhere she went, men were fascinated by her and could not keep away. Some loved her, some used her badly, and some abandoned their homes to follow her. None lasted. They tired of her, or feared her. Or perhaps it was she who shrugged them off to continue on her way. But she never found the pearl stairway to the palace under the water.

  “If you look up just before dawn,” said Anju, “when only a couple of stars are left in the sky, you can see her pass with her daughter, still searching. The fog is the tattered end of her sari. The stars are her eyes that have learned it is of no use to weep.”

  There are many versions to every story. The version you choose reveals more about the storyteller than about the story. What then did this story about the abandoned princess-turned-homebreaker say about Anju? What did it say about her feelings for her cousin—feelings she could touch only when they were wrapped in fiction’s insulations?

  On the way back to the apartment, Sudha stops at an overpass. Below her, cars whizz by, shimmery metallic slashes against the slateboard of the freeway. She takes the letter from her pocket and tears it into tiny pieces. She slips her hand through the wire netting put up by the city to keep people safe—as though safety could be so easily achieved—and lets the pieces fall. “The past is the past,” she whispers. But perhaps we mishear, perhaps it is something quite different that she says, everlasting, or hold fast. It is the year of incomprehensible losses, of unbelievable gains. The death toll in Rwanda has crossed the half-million mark. After twenty-seven years in jail, Mandela has become South Africa’s first black president. Is this the law of the world, that to go forward you must first step back? Her voice is drowned in the dizzying roar of SUVs and Harleys, BMWs and Benzes, as they vie with each other for mastery of the road. The torn bits of paper float for a moment, silver in the evening air. Fragments of phrases (but surely they weren’t in the letter): mine, happiness, why. Then they are gone.

  Eight

  Assignment

  Write an essay examining the effects of culture and heredity upon an individual. Would you say they are more important than character traits in influencing the individual’s behavior? You may support your analysis with personal as well as historical/social examples (approximately fifteen hundred words).

  Loss: An Essay

  by

  Anju Majumdar

  for

  English 3353

  Advanced Composition

  Prof. P. Gossen

  At the age of twenty-five, when she had barely stepped into her adult life, my mother became a widow. No. I’m thinking like me, not like her. She had been an adult since she turned sixteen, the year her parents married her to my father—or, more accurately, to the illustrious Chatterjee family of Calcutta.

  You can weep all you want on the train to Calcutta, her mother had said as she blessed the new bride. But by the time you arrive in your new home, your eyes should be dry. My mother obeyed, as she had been taught. She wept away her girlhood on that train. By the time she arrived at her in-law’s immense marble mansion in Calcutta, her eyes were dry and she was an adult. Perhaps that is why when news of my father’s death came to her—she was pregnant with me at the time—she did not shed a single tear. At least not in public.

  Public is all I know of my mother’s life, because she never spoke of her feelings. Was this, too, what she had been taught?

  Confession: this entire paper is based on hearsay and conjecture.

  My father’s death was the greatest loss in my mother’s life. I think we can all agree on that. It turned her from a wife into a widow. In a society where property and destiny were controlled by men, it w
as not a good way to be.

  These are the things my mother put away after my father’s death: expensive saris, jewelry, romantic thoughts. The rest of her life, she would not eat Ilish fish or read poetry, both of which my father had loved. For a Bengali woman, those were serious sacrifices.

  These are the things my mother made herself forget: that she was afraid; that she was a sexual being; that she needed to weep.

  This is what she made herself remember: she had made a promise to my father, and she would keep it.

  Pishi, my aunt, tells us that in the weeks following my father’s death, thirty-eight male relatives came to the house and offered to take on the burden of caring for my father’s widow (my mother), his unborn child (me), and his property (which would turn out to be considerably less than the thirty-eight male relatives had imagined). To all of them, my mother said no—very politely, as she had been taught. She said she would take care of all three herself. She ended up taking care of a lot more than that—Pishi and Aunt Nalini and Sudha and sick employees at the family bookstore and later, for a while, Dayita. But it was not a problem.

  It was not a problem because, in order to deal with her loss, my mother had turned herself into a man.

  She was a very effective man, more so than my father, who, for all his goodness, was a dreamer and generous to a fault. Also, he had a tendency to trust all the wrong people. (This is why our property was considerably less.) He liked to sit in his easy-chair in the evenings and watch the stars, pointing out constellations enthusiastically but inaccurately. Sometimes he put on old Pankaj Mallik records and sang along. My mother, on the other hand, never sat in an easy chair, never listened to music, particularly the sentimental kind, and never trusted anyone except Pishi. As for stars, they were in the sky, and she was on the earth, and that was that. She also worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, to make sure we could keep living in the marble mansion, which by now was seriously attempting to fall to pieces, in a manner that befitted the descendants of the Chatterjees. This was the promise she had made to my father.

  Because of the promise, my mother always knew what to do, even though (as with my marriage) it might turn out later to be the wrong thing.

  My mother never made me promise her anything.

  Growing up, I loved my mother more than anyone I knew. I admired her completely. When she embraced me, or gave me a rare word of praise, I thought, Paradise must be like this.

  I learned everything I could from my mother.

  But somewhere along the way, I went wrong.

  How do I know this?

  Because of the way I mishandle loss. The loss of my son, which has already occurred. And the loss of my husband, which has begun to occur, and which I cannot stanch.

  Ms. Majumdar,

  Interesting subject matter, though it responds to the assignment in a rather tangential way. Can you give more specific examples in the beginning to help us visualize your mother’s life and times?

  Your prose style is strong, but the paragraph structure is somewhat unorthodox. Watch out for diction, e.g., “Public is all I know of my mother’s life….”I notice a number of fragments in the draft. I am not convinced they are necessary. You mention a number of characters without explaining who they are. This is confusing. Try to move your draft from writer-based prose to reader-based prose.

  The end of the paper loses focus and becomes overly emotional. You should keep yourself out of it. Consider rewriting from “My mother never made me promise her anything.” The part about paradise is a bit of a cliché.

  Overall, this is a good start for an essay—but it needs to be developed in great detail. As I’m sure you remember, the assignment calls for a minimum of six pages. Please revise accordingly and turn it in by May 15.

  P. Gossen

  P.S. I am disturbed by the events you refer to at the end of the paper. I suggest you pay a visit to Counseling (312 Herne Hall).

  Nine

  Sudha

  The bus comes and goes, its finger of smoke rubbing a darker gray into the evening. No Anju. Where is that girl? But nowadays she is often erratic, so I won’t worry yet. Not about her.

  Chilly now. The light withdraws itself. A fog descends. It surrounds me, insistent, until I must breathe it in. Tiny drops of water coat the insides of my lungs. It is like drowning, a little at a time.

  In the apartment parking lot, I look for Sunil’s car. If I see it, I won’t go upstairs, no matter how cold it gets. I’ll wrap my windbreaker around Dayita, and …

  But, thankfully, the car is not there.

  Sometimes I feel I’m being melodramatic. It’s not as though he’ll attack me. He’s not that sort of man. But if our eyes met in an empty room, if we drew the same air, simultaneously, into our lungs, I don’t know what might happen then.

  Each day, weakness sings louder in me. In each fingertip, along the underside of my breasts that ache a little, through the veins lining my arms. The day after I signed my divorce papers, Ashok kissed the vein at my wrist. Each kiss was sharp, defined, like an infusion of blood. Before that, my life had felt so unnecessary. We were sitting by the Ganges at Outram Ghat. The water was brown with silt and patience. He whispered something against my skin. I didn’t hear the words. But the sound was like a remedy spoken by a medicine woman into the ears of a person whose spirit has gone roaming. I put my other hand in the water. The current pressed against my fingers, heavy with age. It reminded me that things go on.

  I turned and kissed Ashok on the lips, shocking him.

  Why am I thinking of this, after I tore up his letter? Why am I thinking of Sunil? What is it I want?

  The apartment is so dark. Turn on the lights—one, two, three. Still, brownness hazes the bulbs. Has the fog insinuated itself into this space as well?

  Seeing Ashok’s letter today, my body drew itself in, tortoise-like. Tightness of shell and stone. Stiffened muscle. I should have been happy, but my body said otherwise. The body, which shows us our real desire.

  I can’t go back to India, to the way I was. Helpless, dependent—I can’t love like that. I can’t bring up my daughter to think that is how a woman needs to live.

  I think there are ways of being otherwise in India, but I don’t know them.

  I can’t stay in my cousin’s home. My presence saws at the frayed rope that holds Anju and Sunil together. Maybe it would break anyway—but I can’t bear to be the reason. And my dreams. Fever-crusted, bloated with—there is no way to circumvent this word—sin. The angled curve of Sunil’s collarbone, a small sweat that stays on my fingertips. The dizzy salt taste of his chest, its rapid rise and fall against my tongue. I want to slough off the images stamped inside my eyelids every morning, the moistness between my legs when I wake.

  Caught inside the walls of this apartment, I have no way to silence my body’s clamoring.

  A key rattles the lock. I am tense to my toes.

  Sudha, where will you go now?

  “Stop! Stop!” Anju says just as I’m pouring her tea. “No sugar!”

  I look at her questioningly. Usually she takes a heaped spoonful. On days when she’s feeling low, she indulges in a spoon and a half.

  “Do you know how bad sugar is for you?” she says. “All those disease-causing empty calories that make you hyper.”

  I make a face. “Whence comes this sudden wisdom?” But I know. Every day she picks up snippets of self-improvement from college, some fad or other.

  “I’m serious. I think you, too, should stop.”

  She’s sitting earnest and cross-legged in jeans on the sofa, backpack thrown to the floor, the cup of tea clasped in her hands. Her face glows with zeal.

  “Not me,” I say in some annoyance. “I like my vices, thank you.”

  “Really, Sudha! It’s only a habit. We form habits, we can change them into more positive ones.” Then she breaks into a grin. “I know, I know, I sound like a bad copy of a Stephen Covey tape!”

  I don’t know who this Covey is, b
ut I don’t feel like telling her that.

  She’s talking about her day at school. Zora Neale Hurston, she says. Kate Chopin. More names that mean nothing to me. She waves her arm, gathering a wideness of air to herself. On the arm, glass bangles, color of blue ice. I must have helped pack them into her wedding suitcase, but I cannot remember it. The bangles make a tinkling, water music. When did she start wearing them again?

  “So that horrid Professor Gossen, who always corrects my grammar and never sees that I’m trying to do something different, is away today—some conference where she’s presenting a paper, probably on comma splice—and this visiting professor is there instead. She’s reading aloud from the assignments she liked because she says we learn a lot from hearing the work of other student writers. And then she starts reading my essay! I could have died! You remember that essay about my mother I was having so much trouble with, the one Gossen thought was too ambiguous and went off-topic? Her comments depressed me so much that I didn’t even revise it, just turned it in, expecting a C. And this new woman thinks it’s one of the best in the class! She writes on the paper that I have Originality and Voice!”

  “Voice,” I say, nodding as though I hear the word every day. I’m glad Anju is so happy about it, whatever it means.

  “I bet Gossen’s going to have a hernia when she finds out! But, wait, that’s not the best part! After the class a couple of women come up to me and say that they think my writing’s really strong—all this time they had no idea because of course Gossen would rather shit bricks than praise my work.”

  Shit bricks! I try to keep the consternation off my face. But underneath I’m thinking how little I have in common anymore with this new Anju.

  “—And then they ask me to join their writers’ group,” she finishes in triumph.

  “Writers’ group,” I say, trying hard to understand. But I can’t. My head feels stuffy, as though I’m coming down with a cold. A writers’ group? What’s the use of that?